11th June 2020, 8:51 PM
(10th June 2020, 6:32 AM)Sacred Jellybean Wrote: 100% with you on ranked choice voting. Our democracy has become dysfunctional, in dire need of reform. We can't afford to stay in a binary choice. More political parties means more need to compromise. It cannot be one party vs the other in a zero-sum game. That's what allows a scumbag like Mitch McConnell to exploit the system to further the agenda of one party. In times of egregious division of a binary choice, you have Republicans having to accept alt-right nut jobs, and far leftists having to settle for a corporatist, war mongering party.I'd be fine with downplaying the role of the federal government in some avenues of life in favor of more state and local governing to an extent so long as human rights are not infringed upon. Growing up in the south, I've heard all my life that the Civil War was fought over states' rights, but a quick look at primary sources will show you that the presevation of slavery did, in fact, have everything to do with the southern states seceding, with the argument of states' rights being an excuse to infringe upon human rights. That is where I think having a federal government that supercedes state and local governments can be useful. Slavery isn't okay anywhere. Likewise, LGBTQ+ discrimination is wrong in every county and every jurisdiction regardless of what the local populace thinks about civil rights for certain demographics.
We cannot get rid of electoral college without having something to replace it. Frustrating as it is, eliminating it would ensure power and representation to be confined to populous cities. If we were to throw it out, it would only be fair to scale back the role of federal government and empower states to mostly govern themselves. Otherwise, flyover states are at the mercy of LA, New York City, Chicago, etc. Is that fair? Rural areas are much different, and setting rules for them based on big cities seems like an awful idea. I'm not well-versed in history, but I feel like there must be some precedent for poor, rural areas being oppressed by rich, big cities.
I know that right now, we're all at the mercy of swing states. That's obviously problematic, but it just seems like getting rid of electoral college would, on the whole, make things worse.
That said, while I don't think the metropolises should necessarily dictate the everyday way of life for rural Wyoming (redundant, I know), I find it even more unfair that a state mostly comprised of tumbleweeds should have more sway in deciding who the next president is than a state such as California whose population is greater than all of Canada's. I don't think someone's vote should have any more or less of an impact on the outcome of an election just because of how big their yard is, how many (or how few) neighbors they have, and what side of an arbitrarily drawn border from the eighteenth or nineteenth century they live on.
One of the problems with the electoral college is that a candidate only needs to win a tiny majority of a state to get all of its electoral votes. You win 51% of Ohio, you get all of its electoral votes. The other 49% thus gets ignored in the grand scheme of things, even if that 49% contributes to a larger popular vote victory for the losing candidate (as we saw in 2016). I think Maine and Nebraska are the only states that split electoral votes.
(10th June 2020, 3:18 PM)Weltall Wrote: If the president is elected by a straight national popular vote, then every single vote counts equally. It means that right wingers in LA get a voice they don't have, and both left wingers in Louisiana get a voice they don't have. Candidates won't be able to appeal just to big cities, because even if cities lean one way politically, they are no longer absolute blocs that will deliver whole states to them by default. This would empower minority voices in both environments (by which I mean country libs and city cons), and they will be more willing to vote, knowing that their vote actually counts for something.
Rural areas still get a voice through Congress, in fact, an outsized voice as things stand. The executive is only one branch of government.
Right now, 35-40 states get absolutely no say at all in presidential elections, which means that a relatively tiny minority of voters can ever cast a meaningful vote for president. It's hard to imagine any alternative not being a substantial improvement over this nonsense.
It's also worth noting that there were more than 30 parties in 1932 Germany, which let one of those parties gain control with 30 percent of the vote. In 1934 Germany, there was only one party.
Precisely. A lot of people who don't live in swing states are demotivated by the fact that their votes don't count for anything at all (and though I vote regularly, I am one such person whose vote doesn't have any power to influence a presidential election).
And yes, having too many parties poses the problem that a less than desirable party (like the Nazi party) can win an election with a plurality of the vote, but not a majority, on account of the majority being split between other, more rational choices. That's why I support ranked choice voting. We've seen elections even in our own history in which the least popular candidate won because there was a legitimate third party challenge (most notably in 1912 when Teddy Roosevelt challenged incumbent William Taft, allowing Woodrow Wilson to squeak into the White House). That's why I support ranked choice voting if we go the "more than two choices" route. That way, candidates who have the most broad appeal have the best chance of winning even when they aren't everyone's first choice.
But that's not the system we have, and in the system we do have, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of voting in primary elections. Anyone who doesn't vote in the primaries relinquishes the right to complain that our final two choices are both bad.